Now's the time to update your Amazon keywords
Welcome to 2024, Amazon sellers! You made it through the crazy months of holiday shopping. Now that you’ve swept the confetti away, it’s time to take a breath and redirect your focus to your online business housekeeping.
New Year isn’t just a symbolic time for fresh starts and resolutions—it’s also a prime (see what i did there?) opportunity for Amazon sellers to review keywords.
Why? Because keywords, as you know, are the lifeblood of discoverability on Amazon.
If you haven’t updated your keywords in a year or more, it’s worth taking a few minutes to check see what kind of traffic you may be missing out on and make a few updates.
We’ll guide you through the how-to's to accomplish this task and stay competitive with Perci’s cutting-edge AI Amazon tools. Let’s push your listings from the back pages to the front of the customer search line (or if you’re already in front, let’s keep you there).
Why should I update Amazon SEO Keywords?
70% of Amazon customers never click past the first page of their initial search results. And 35% of Amazon shoppers click on the first product featured on a search page. You're either on the first page, or you're nowhere—that’s why you need the right keywords.
Amazon keywords are how potential customers will find your product. They direct Amazon's search algorithm towards your listing, among the vast ocean of competitors.
So let's get your products in the spotlight.
When Should I Update my Amazon Keywords?
You should update your keywords at least once a year, and if you can do it even more often, all the better.
The New Year is a great opportunity to make these keyword changes.
Why? After the holidays, consumers often shift their buying patterns, with New Year’s resolutions or changing seasonal priorities.
This is also a quieter time for most sellers. Later in the year, you’ll be neck deep getting ready for Prime, Cyber Monday and who knows what else. While things are quiet after the holiday season, this is a a great time to get your keywords set so you can focus on inventory and customer support when sales pick up again.
Updating keywords now will also give your new keywords plenty of time to index in Amazon’s search algorithm, so you can start getting more traffic and sales as soon as possible.
So how can we do this, step-
Step 1: Analyze Your Current Amazon Keywords
A crucial part of updating your keywords is seeing which ones to cull. A keyword might have been great last year, but that doesn't mean it will be today.
The best way to analyze your current keywords? Do ‘competitor’ research on your own ASIN!
Perci’s Keyword Wizard tool is typically for analyzing Amazon-wide keywords, using root keyword searches or searching specific competitor ASINS. But it can show you every keyword your own listing is currently indexed for, along with helpful performance metrics.
And the best part about Perci's Keyword Wizard? It's free!
Open Keyword Wizard, and enter your listing ASIN into the search bar. Then add basic product info below that (name and brief product details). Then click ‘search’.
You’ll then see the keywords indexed for your listing:
Scroll through the keywords and look for keywords that are underperforming on a few important metrics.
Relevance: This is a metric calculated by Perci, which tells you exactly how relevant each keyword is to your product information. If the relevance is really low, it’s probably a good candidate to let go in favor of better keywords.
Bad Organic Ranking: If your listing is ranked really low for a keyword, that’s a good hint that it’s not a great fit for your product.
Bad Keyword Sales: An underperforming keyword with bad sales indicates that it may not be as relevant to customers’ search behaviour as you thought. You might have solid search volume on a keyword, and ranking well—but if the shoppers aren’t buying, it doesn’t help you.
As you go through your keywords, note any candidates you might want to take out (you'll need this later on!)
Step 2: Find New Amazon Keywords
Now that you’ve identified keywords to let go of (or maybe you didn’t have enough keywords to begin with!), you can find better keywords to replace them with.
Leave your existing Keyword Wizard search open, and open a new Keyword Wizard tab. Now instead of searching your own ASIN, add either:
- ASINs of your top competitors, or
- A root keyword for your product, like ‘grill grate’ or ‘large dog bed’
The goal here is to look across Amazon to find the best keywords out there, and compare them to your current keyword list.
Note: Keyword searches tend to be full of extra ‘junk’. Before you compare keywords, click ‘Detect Bad Keywords’ on the left to clean up this new keyword list with Perci’s AI. It will automatically remove keywords you shouldn’t consider at all, like competitor brands, misspellings and foreign keywords.
Now look down this new keyword list. Compare the relevance, search volume and keyword sales here to your keywords.
Do you see lots of keywords that aren’t in your listing? Do you see keyword sales or search volumes much higher than your current keywords? Those are signs of keywords you should consider adding to your listing.
Step 3: Optimize New Keywords into Your Amazon Listing
How you optimize these new keywords into your listing depends mainly on how many new keywords you want to optimize.
If you only have a few keywords to optimize: you can easily do it by hand. Edit your new keywords into your title, bullets or backend depending on the importance of the keyword. Save and upload your changes, and you’re done!
If you have a lot of keywords to optimize: the best option is using Perci to generate a new optimized listing with all of your keywords.
Perci’s Listing Generator can write a new optimized title, bullets, description and backend keywords all fit to Amazon SEO best practice. (It also detects any Amazon restricted phrases to keep your listing safe from suppression, and does a lot else to guarantee great listing content).
To use Listing Generator to generate a new optimized listing, create a final keyword list by combining your existing keywords and your new keywords together in the order of importance.
Then follow this tutorial to generate a new, fully optimized listing, adding your custom keyword list to the SEO section.
New Year, New Amazon SEO Keywords
The New Year is a fresh opportunity to optimize your product listings with strategic keywords. These small phrases hold the power to vastly improve your product’s visibility, drive more customers to your listings and improve sales.
Make the most of the quiet new year period and set your business up for better performance and profitability in 2024.
Here's to a successful year ahead—one keyword at a time.